Trump surfs tsunami of events
By; Tom Jackson – Columnist for News Talk Florida
In a week filled with absurdism heaped upon the unbelievable, featuring Clinton ally and family foundation contractor Sidney Blumenthal being exposed as an early “birther,” this stood out:
Wrigley, the manufacturer of Skittles, scolded the son of major presidential candidate who’d employed its product to advance an argument unflattering to Syrian refugees.
Accompanied by an image of a heaping bowlful of the colorful, candy that sticks to your teeth, Donald Trump Jr., displaying his father’s gift for abrading thin skins, tweeted:
This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first. #trump2016 pic.twitter.com/9fHwog7ssN
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 19, 2016
The usual suspects were, of course, scandalized, citing Junior for fear-mongering and worse, noting the tiny odds of actually being dispatched by a refugee.
In other words, once again fractions have been victimized by someone involved in the race for the White House. Hillary Clinton says she might have gotten the proportion of deplorables among Trump supporters wrong. And if refugees were a bowlful of Skittles, maybe it’s only somewhere between a third and three-quarters of a piece that could prove lethal, so, hey, dig in.
Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to.
Seriously, do they not teach metaphors in school anymore? In a statement, Wrigley said, “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it is an appropriate analogy.”
Maybe if Trump Jr. had used M&Ms or Reese’s Pieces, Wrigley would have approved. Americans who are less fussy about their candy choices but are, at the same time, increasingly wary of imported threats souring our melting pot, understand precisely what he was getting at.
Especially after last weekend’s parallel, if unconnected, episodes in and around New York and outside Minneapolis, in which young men evidently guided by radical Islam perpetrated random acts of terror on innocents.
What got the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) all lathered up? What else? Trump’s eagerness to call a bomb a bomb, and to link its explosion with America’s top-down malaise.
All of this activity coincides with a race that was over — Over! I tell you! — in the middle of August becoming, astonishingly, essentially tied in the middle of September. Even more remarkable, the guy who was dead in the water then is surfing a wave of momentum now.
How could that be? It’s not just because Hillary is, certifiably, the Worst Candidate Ever. She was just as awful four weeks ago when pollsters everywhere were fitting her for a crown. And it’s only slightly about Trump mostly — but only mostly — behaving himself.
What’s really going on, as Harold MacMillan, the former British prime minister, reportedly said, is, “Events, my dear boy, events.”
Among those events was Clinton’s mystery collapse on a breezy New York Sunday morning, and her campaign’s failure to come clean in a timely manner, reminding what we’ve known, and her supporters accept, about HRC’s willingness to sacrifice honesty on the altar of her paranoia.
But that incident was small change compared to the fresh, rude reminders of the world as it exists, and intrudes on us, nearly eight years after Barack Obama’s first inauguration. The growing evidence is we’re sick of being played for patsies.
In the aftermath of the alleged, foiled plot to kill or maim Americans using shrapnel-packed homemade explosive devices by Afghanistan-born Osama bin Laden fan Ahmad Rahami, President Obama once again exhorted us to say something if we see something. But we know that’s not how it works. When each new incident of Islam-inspired violence launches the inevitable “backlash feared” headline, we’re constantly being programmed to avert our eyes and keep our yaps shut.
See something, say something? How’s that working out for us? When an Irving, Texas, English teacher saw something — a box resembling, to the untrained eye, a bomb — and said something that got its creator arrested, the cost of alertness was steep: a kick in the pants from our see-something-say-something president and a lawsuit — served from Qatar, which invited the new celebrity family home — filed by the boy’s parents.
So, yeah. Exercise vigilance. Get pummeled and/or sued for sticking your neck out. This is the America, for better or worse, Trump is lately reaching and energizing.
While the world burns, and Russia stokes the flames by bombing a U.N. relief convoy in Syria, President Obama lectures Vladimir Putin on the pitfalls of projecting force from the false reality of Turtle Bay. Maybe he was alluding to red lines. Maybe not. Who can tell anymore?
Meanwhile, Clinton — who peddled Obama’s lead-from-elsewhere foreign policy prescriptions for four years — promises more of this sort of “steadiness.” Really? With bombs shaking New York and, on behalf of some bizarre interpretation of a narrow-minded Allah, a knife-wielding madman stabbing Minnesota infidels.
And what engrosses the Left? Skittles. And Trump’s brilliant trolling of the Clinton campaign over the “birther” saga.
Unbelievable.
